Back to the Future: A New Look at Modernist Hero Norman Bel Geddes, Designer of the Original 1939 “Futurama”

In 1932, The New Yorkerpublished a cartoon showing a group of businessmen sitting around a boardroom table. “Gentlemen,” one of them says, “I am convinced that our next new biscuit must by styled by Norman Bel Geddes.”

Norman Bel Geddes never did design any biscuits, but he designed almost everything else, and for a couple of decades he was almost surely the best-known designer in America, the go-to guy for General Motors (he designed the company’s famous Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair), Chrysler (he tweaked the Airflow, one of the first commercially produced aerodynamic vehicles), Philco (radios), and RCA (more radios). He designed appliances for Electrolux, seltzer bottles for Walter Kidde, vanities for the Simmons Company, and a chrome-plated cocktail set for Revere Copper and Brass that is an exclamation point of Art Moderne. Bel Geddes, who began his career as a stage designer, was a key figure—perhaps the key figure—in the first generation of industrial designers, men like Henry Dreyfuss, Russel Wright, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Raymond Loewy.

Those four all started firms that in some form continue today. Bel Geddes, however, did not. His studio, which once employed 75 people at a posh Rockefeller Center address, faded after World War II. He was not, it would seem, the easiest man to work for or the one most focused on client service. He was interested in his own dreams. If they happened to intersect with a client’s needs, wonderful. If not—well, by the time he died in 1958 at 65, he had become a marginal figure, his office closed. He’s a lot less remembered these days than his daughter, the actress Barbara Bel Geddes (from Rear Window and later the TV series Dallas).

The Museum of the City of New York, which over the last few years has developed a sideline in mounting some of the best architecture and design exhibitions in town, has just dug into Bel Geddes’s archives at the University of Texas and produced a spectacular show that, if nothing else, will put him back front and center in the design consciousness. The exhibition, curated by Donald Albrecht, is the first full-scale Bel Geddes retrospective ever mounted, covering his entire career. It opens with a bit of intriguing biographical material: we learn that he was born Norman Geddes and was heavily influenced by his mother’s Christian Science not toward the religion itself, but toward its belief in mind over matter. When he was young he performed as a magician, and he was a natural salesman. What excited Geddes most of all was the idea of a glorious, glittering, modern future. You could say he was the opposite of Fritz Lang—the modern metropolis for him was going to be all spiritual enlightenment and visual beauty, a new world in which technology did only good things and made only beautiful, streamlined objects.

Bel Geddes—the “Bel” was to incorporate the name of his first wife, but probably also because it made his name sound exotic and somehow modern—was a missionary preaching the gospel of modernism. Part of the joy of this exhilarating exhibition is seeing a lot of the objects he designed for real. There are streamlined radios, little cars that bear some resemblance to the Dymaxion car designed by Buckminster Fuller, a prototype streamlined house that looks like it would fit right into Miami Beach, and an enormous ocean liner that is vastly more beautiful than the hulking boxes that pass for cruise ships today.

Bel Geddes’s greatest achievement, the Futurama at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, is long gone, and the fact that it exists only in photographs and some brief film clips probably contributed to Bel Geddes’s falling off the design radar. The exhibition contains a wealth of documentation of this project, however, and it gave me the chance to look at it more carefully than I ever have. The Futurama was a gargantuan model of the postwar city as Bel Geddes—and presumably GM—envisioned it: wide freeways with cloverleaf intersections, handsome and sleek skyscrapers, everything big and shiny and full of movement. It looks like the Houston of 2013 on a good day, with no smog and with constantly moving traffic. Bel Geddes’s vision of towers in open space wasn’t altogether different from Le Corbusier’s famous plans for Paris, but it’s Le Corbusier married to the razzle-dazzle hotels of John Portman. Bel Geddes’s city is full of swoops and curves; the shapely buildings dance with you instead of looking at you sternly, the way Le Corbusier’s cruciform towers do. Next to Bel Geddes’s exciting place, Le Corbusier’s seems prim, not to say puritanical. You aren’t surprised, looking at this, to learn that among the other things Bel Geddes came up with before anyone else were revolving rooftop restaurants and stadiums with retractable roofs. (His stadium was an early-1950s proposal for the Brooklyn Dodgers.)

The Futurama turns out to be a descendant, Albrecht has discovered, of an advertising campaign Bel Geddes produced for Shell Oil in 1937 called “City of Tomorrow,” which was intended to promote the use of gasoline by showing the magnificent world that the automobile would bring forth. Bel Geddes expanded it for GM, making it even more alluring. When you look at the Futurama now, it seems like a stunning combination of foresight and naïveté. Bel Geddes figured out what the modern American city was going to look like before anyone else did. He knew that visual excitement and energy had to be a part of modernism. He just failed to understand that there were other things that made cities work, such as streets and neighborhoods, not to mention serendipity, and that these things were incompatible with the world of the automobile. Norman Bel Geddes never quite understood how the world really worked. But more than anyone else, he gave modernism panache.

Back to the Future: A New Look at Modernist Hero Norman Bel Geddes, Designer of the Original 1939 “Futurama”

Bel Geddes’s signature contribution to the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair was the Futurama exhibit he designed for General Motors. Here we see him with one of the Futurama’s dioramas, supervising work, it appears, on the City of Tomorrow with two unidentified Women of Today.

Model for a revolving, 25-story Aerial Restaurant that Bel Geddes designed for the 1932 Chicago World’s Fair. Sadly, the proposed steel, aluminum, and glass structure was never built. Nor were any Aerial Restaurant–shaped souvenir swizzle sticks, or so historians believe.

Bel Geddes’s signature contribution to the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair was the Futurama exhibit he designed for General Motors. Here we see him with one of the Futurama’s dioramas, supervising work, it appears, on the City of Tomorrow with two unidentified Women of Today.

Model for a revolving, 25-story Aerial Restaurant that Bel Geddes designed for the 1932 Chicago World’s Fair. Sadly, the proposed steel, aluminum, and glass structure was never built. Nor were any Aerial Restaurant–shaped souvenir swizzle sticks, or so historians believe.